Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

[Julie2owlsdene]

I'm reading the Riddle of the Painted Box at the moment. When I've finished that I'll start The Fourth Key.

[Julie2owlsdene]

I've just finished reading - The Riddle of the Painted Box. I enjoyed the story, it was very good. But somehow Saville doesn't have that same quality of writing as Enid had. Enid took you right into her stories I feel, and kept you there. Whereas Saville was a good writer, but didn't take you right into the story, you just read about it, if you know what I mean. Also, I'd like to have had justice for Larry the dog. You hear no more about the Willis's at the end of the book.

I'm wondering how Enid would have written that story. And somehow I think she would have made a bit more of the story itself.

The next one I'm starting to read is the Fourth Key.

[Chrissie777]

The only Saville book that took me right into the story was "Treasure at the Mill" which was also filmed for CFF.

[Anita Bensoussane]

I agree that Enid Blyton's writing style is special, Julie. She uses a lot of natural-sounding dialogue, full of life and bounce and banter, which makes the reader warm to the characters and enter into their world. Many other writers, including Malcolm Saville, seem a little formal by comparison. Enid Blyton is skilled at building suspense and tension too, whereas Malcolm Saville sometimes reveals things quite early on that could perhaps have been kept a mystery for longer. I'm afraid I'm unable to give any examples as it's ages since I've read any of his books but it's something that occurred to me on several occasions.

[Julie2owlsdene]

The only Saville book that took me right into the story was "Treasure at the Mill" which was also filmed for CFF.

I've read that book too, Chrissie, enjoyed it. But somehow he hasn't got the same writing skills as Enid has. And as Anita has just said, I think it's the way Enid's characters behave, and have a bounce and banter, which brings them more to life in a way.

[dsr]

I've just finished reading - The Riddle of the Painted Box. I enjoyed the story, it was very good. But somehow Saville doesn't have that same quality of writing as Enid had. Enid took you right into her stories I feel, and kept you there. Whereas Saville was a good writer, but didn't take you right into the story, you just read about it, if you know what I mean. Also, I'd like to have had justice for Larry the dog. You hear no more about the Willis's at the end of the book.

I'm wondering how Enid would have written that story. And somehow I think she would have made a bit more of the story itself.

The next one I'm starting to read is the Fourth Key.

I used to like the "Susan, Bill" series. I can't really remember why, but I'm fairly sure they were aimed at a slightly younger audience.

The saving grace of the Lone Pine series was the twins. Same mistake as Enid Blyton (identical opposite sex twins being impossible) but they were entertaining. Albeit wildly unrealistic.

[timv]

I'm also a fan of 'Treasure at the Mill', which was the first Saville book that I ever read. I think it was an adaptation of the script for a radio play which MS wrote for the BBC ; the mill featured is based on the real one at Ardleigh in Essex, near what is now a reservoir, and the children of the family there were based on a real family who MS knew. The opening of the story, with 'our hero' frequenting an empty mill-house which is then moved into by newcomers and continuing to go there secretly until he makes friends with the new owners, is very similar to one of the storylines in the Lone Pine story 'Saucers Over The Moor', written in 1954. I'm not sure which influenced which, though .

My own favourite Saville series was and remains the well-observed 'family' series known as 'Nettleford', where the main characters Sally and Paul live at a bookshop run by their parents in a small Surrey town of that name (probably based on Dorking with the shop based on Thorpe's Bookshop in Guildford). This has a few 'light' crime mysteries and treasure-hunts, but nothing on the scale of seriousness or gripping danger of the Lone Pine series and a lot more about family relationships, visiting 'snob' children looking down on S and P for not having much money but being 'reformed', and exploring the countryside (both Surrey and Yorkshire, and at one point Tenby in SW Wales). The weather presents the worst dangers, eg with flash floods like that in 'Lone Pine Five' - but the worst crooks are stealers of rare birds' eggs or treasure-hunters, not spies or gangsters. (Enid seems to avoid many bad weather disasters/ threats, except the realistic Hebridean storms in the Adventurous Four books and Sea of Adventure and the thunderstorm at the castle in Castle of Adventure- did she experience this less in her Thames valley home than MS did in his South coast Sussex homes and so take less notice of it?) It's a pity that the Nettleford books are difficult to find now and were not republished in the most recent (pre-Girls Gone By) MS series edition in the 1980s. MS's publishers, like Blyton ones with the Famous Five and Find-Outers series, seemed to prefer long and 'high intensity' series to family books as more profitable. Most of my Nettleford copies are old second-hand ones.

[Chrissie777]

I'm also a fan of 'Treasure at the Mill', which was the first Saville book that I ever read. I think it was an adaptation of the script for a radio play which MS wrote for the BBC ; the mill featured is based on the real one at Ardleigh in Essex, near what is now a reservoir, and the children of the family there were based on a real family who MS knew.

Tim, you might be interested in this article which I posted a few times on EBS in the past:

https://bearalley.blogspot.com/2008/08/ ... ettit.html

Harry Pettit made the illustrations for Malcolm Saville's book "Treasure at the Mill".
If you order this older DVD version of "Treasure at the Mill", Harry Pettit's daughter (who played the female lead in the CFF film based on the book) explored the Ardleigh Mill with the new owner in the bonus material:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Treasure-and-T ... 163&sr=1-1

It's currently unavailable, but maybe somebody offers it on eBay.
"Treasure at the Mill" was recently part of a CFF Bumper triple DVD set by BFI, but I don't know if it contains the bonus material as well?
We lived in the UK way back in 2008 and drove all the way from Uxbridge near London to Cambridge and then to Colchester to visit Colchester Castle which has a Roman Museum (which was mentioned in Barbara Erskine's novel "Midnight is a lonely Place"). I wish I would have known way back then how close I was to Ardleigh Mill, but unfortunately I didn't watch the DVD before we returned to the US.

[timv]

Thanks for the link, Chrissie. Colchester itself features (unnamed but recognisable) in the children's books of 1940s-80s author Pamela Brown, especially 'The Swish Of The Curtain' and 'Blue Door Venture', part of a series where a group of teenage aspiring actors set up their own 'theatre' at a hired derelict hall in a large town and put on plays there to raise funds. Later on some of them move into acting and TV, as appropriate for the 1960s - and it's rare to have a series that focuses on people with 'serious' theatrical ambitions, though ballet and its offshoots was a regular and popular subject as with Noel Streatfeild and Lorna Hill (and Mabel Esther Allan aka 'Jean Estoril'). I was interested in the Pamela Brown series as I did a lot of acting at school, and at one junior school was in the school 'company' that entered county-level competitions performing at real theatres.

MS did feature the eastern East Anglia coast (Suffolk) in one Lone Pine book, 'Sea Witch Comes Home', which uses the real life devastating floods of 1953 as a backdrop for a story about stolen picture smuggling in Southwold and Walberswick. But his new characters Paul and Rose Channing (living at W, the son and daughter of a local yachtsman with dodgy connections) were never featured again in the series despite being less 'sporty' and more 'arty' than most of the Lone Piners' friends, which I found disappointing. This was also the only LP book to just feature David Morton and the twins and none of the other LP characters - possibly it was designed as a try-out for a 'spin-off' series but sales figures were disappointing.

[Chrissie777]

I've read that book too, Chrissie, enjoyed it. But somehow he hasn't got the same writing skills as Enid has. And as Anita has just said, I think it's the way Enid's characters behave, and have a bounce and banter, which brings them more to life in a way.

Julie, is "Treasure at the Mill" a stand-alone book or does it belong to a series?

[timv]

For Malcolm Saville fans , especially of The Gay Dolphin Adventure (set around Rye) and also Monica Edwards fans, on Channel Five (UK) at 7.30 p. m. yesterday (8 April) the Rye Harbour/ Camber Castle nature reserve was featured on one of Kate Humble's 'Coastal Walks' programmes. This should be on 'catch-up' websites for those who are interested; it gives a good view of what the place looks like as of last winter, with an impressive list of 300-odd rare species spotted there regularly according to the reserve's warden who was interviewed. The place has changed somewhat since MS's and ME's time, though - and since I was there in the 1980s. (The GDA was written just after the end of the Second World War, and Monica's 1947-69 books are partly based on her teens at Rye Harbour in the early 1930s.) They've flooded bits of the marshland which was just fields then, to provide extra habitat for wading birds and rare plants - very impressive.

This location is just to the SSW of Rye, between it and the sea, and West of the mouth of the River Rother which we see in the film - and also West of where Monica Edwards grew up, at Rye Harbour village from which we see Kate Humble walking onto the reserve . The Camber golf course, which Enid probably used on her 1924 stay with Hugh, is on the other side of the river (East) but we see it in the distance as Kate walks down the riverbank and when she's at the river-mouth at the end of the episode. The programme gives an idea of what the real marsh around the probable main 'Smugglers Top' location is like now, though I suspect that Enid gave rein to her imagination in the book as it was mostly dried out when she wrote the FF book - and the beach location at the river-mouth where Kate ends the episode is the exact location of the opening scene in Monica Edwards' book 'Hidden In A Dream' (where Meryon has an accident on the beach and knocks himself out but later seems to remember seeing someone caught in the quicksands). The river-mouth current , which Kate did not mention, makes this beach rather dangerous - and I felt the current myself even about half a mile along Camber beach when I was there as a teenager.

[Anita Bensoussane]

The Camber golf course, which Enid probably used on her 1924 stay with Hugh, is on the other side of the river (East)...

Did Enid and Hugh play golf? According to Barbara Stoney in Enid Blyton - the Biography, Kenneth introduced Enid to golf about a year after their marriage (they married in October 1943). Barbara says in Chapter 10, "Under Kenneth's expert tuition, for he had at one time been a scratch player, she soon achieved a handicap of twenty-six and later managed to reduce this to eighteen."

[Debbie]

I've read that book too, Chrissie, enjoyed it. But somehow he hasn't got the same writing skills as Enid has. And as Anita has just said, I think it's the way Enid's characters behave, and have a bounce and banter, which brings them more to life in a way.

Julie, is "Treasure at the Mill" a stand-alone book or does it belong to a series?

It's stand alone. I think there's only 2 stand alone fiction books, that and "The Thin Grey Man" or something like that!

[Moonraker]

Julie, is "Treasure at the Mill" a stand-alone book or does it belong to a series?

As Debbie says, it is a stand-alone book. Here is a link to the Malcolm Saville website.

https://www.witchend.com/shop/books/tre ... t-the-mill

[Chrissie777]

It's stand alone. I think there's only 2 stand alone fiction books, that and "The Thin Grey Man" or something like that!

Thank you, Debbie! ♥